by Ashura
pairing: Bran/Will
disclaimer: don't I wish I owned Will, Bran, and the whole Dark is Rising sequence? But alas, I don't. and I have no money to take, because I write fanfiction rather than doing things to get paid.
notes: technically, this ought to take place in about 1984, to really keep the timeline in place from where the books left off. I claim fanficcer's prerogative to mess with the timing, though, and just say "present day," the way one does when writing a script.
Also, there is a bit of Welsh in places. I couldn't avoid it completely, but tried to keep it to a minimum, since it's been a good 15 years since anyone actually asked me to say anything in Welsh, and I try to keep from butchering a perfectly lovely language. Translations at the bottom.
****
"...Loving bonds," Merriman said, "are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all of this earth."
--Silver on the Tree
part i: unigrwydd
The smell of sweat is terrifying. It's not the unpleasant body odor kind of sweat that comes from honest work, or the tangy, musky kind that lingers in the air after sex. It's nightmare sweat—panic in liquid form, oozing out of my body, stinging my skin as I flail free of the blankets that pinion me to my bed. I've been dreaming again, and it is horrible.
4.07 in the morning. Red numbers flashing in the dark like the eyes that followed me through my dreamscape. For months now I've been trying to escape them, red eyes and black horses, a roiling storm of steel-grey and crimson. They come sporadically, without reason or announcement, to haunt my sleep, and almost, almost I comprehend them. I grasp for knowledge of them even as I flee them.
I'm shivering. I was so hot only a few moments ago, but now the cold autumn air against my sweat-damped skin chills me.
I can't do this anymore.
The wooden floor is so cold against the bottoms of my feet, but I wrap the blanket around my shoulders and pad into the hallway. I do this every time, and I never make it more than a few steps out my bedroom door. It's so quiet here when I'm alone, and this time I make it all the way into the living room, as far as picking up the phone.
I stare at it, I'm not sure how long. Whenever I wake up like this, I always think I'm going to call, but I never do. It's been too long, and I'm not confident that we have the sort of friendship that privileges me to call in the middle of the night because of a bad dream.
But this time I'm more shaken than before, and I need to hear his voice—even if all he does is snap at me and hang up, I think, even that would jar me back into the world. Even that would be something.
So I dial. I have the number memorised, even though I almost never use it. The order of the numbers is burned into my eyelids.
It rings four times, and I'm starting to think better of it, that maybe I should hang up after all.
"H—hello?" The voice is groggy, bleary, mazed with sleep, but it's him. My shoulders slump, but my hands are shaking.
"Will? It's Bran Davies."
A pause, and for a moment I'm afraid that I've lost him already, or that he's fallen back asleep. Then, with some effort, he sounds a little more awake—"Bran...it's four something in the morning."
"I know. I'm sorry."
Maybe it's the catch in my voice, or maybe it's just because he's always been that much more perceptive than other people. Or maybe it's just that he knows things can't be all right if I'm calling out of the blue at this hour. "Bran, what's wrong?"
"I had a bad dream." It sounds so absurd when I say it. I'm afraid that now he'll cut me off—I think I would, were our places reversed. Or maybe not. He's the one person who's always been able to get under my skin.
"What kind of dream?" I'm not sure if he's really interested, or soothing me, or just stalling til he can get off the phone, but I tell him. I tell him about the red eyes and horses, and the way they chase after me, and how there are other things, a ship and a sword and a lake in the mountains that I can almost grasp but never quite manage to reach. Images and intangible emotions form into words and tumble from my dry lips, desperate to escape. I have never allowed them to before.
"It feels like something that wants me to remember it." It's the first time I've given words to these fears, and now I can't stop. "I'm sorry to call you in the middle of the night like this, really I am. But—" The admission burns my tongue, but I have no choice. "I...I don't have anybody else. I mentioned it to my da once, in passing, and he went all distant on me. There isn't anyone else but you."
And when at last I fall quiet I am sure I hear him sigh. "It's only a dream, Bran," he says, but I hear the wistfulness in his voice that he's too weary to hide, and it seizes something in my gut and twists it. The mellow, even timbre of his voice stirs memories I can't quite catch, that float away before I can pin them down.
"Come see me." It slips out before I can stop it. I don't know if I would have, anyway.
The pause is longer this time. "I have class, Bran. In three and a half hours, in fact."
"Come after, then." My throat feels like it's swollen from the nervous lump forming in it. "I need to see you." Some part of me realises how that sounds and I wince.
But he only says, "You do?"
I don't want to frighten him the way I'm already starting to frighten myself. I temporise. "I mean, if there's a way for you to get away—I know you've got things—"
"It's all right." He cuts me off. "I'll find a train tomorrow. Today, rather."
I feel like all the breath and tension flood out of my body at once. It really will be all right. He'll help me figure this out, make sense of things again. "Thank you."
"It's fine." He still sounds half-asleep, but there's a dry amusement there as well, and a note of disbelief. I don't blame him. I haven't seen him in three years, and that was only for a Christmas—I think it's all a bit strange myself, but I don't know what else to do.
And whatever else, I know he's the only one who can help. I'm not sure how I know it, but I do.
He yawns, and suddenly I'm not sure how long we've been quiet. "I'm going back to sleep."
I thank him again, and apologise once more for waking him up, and we hang up. I wander back to my bed, wavering between exhaustion and a state of excitement that makes me afraid I won't be able to fall asleep again.
But I do, faster and more quietly than I had thought. It will all be over soon.
****
He rings me from Buckinghamshire a little after noon to tell me he's got a train.
"You're sure you want me to come down?" I am sure, and I try to tell him so without making a fool of myself. Fortunately Will, like everyone else, is used to my being a bit odd at times, so he just says he'll be in Tywyn around dinnertime and if I'm going to drag him out on a moment's notice that the least I can do is feed him when he gets here. He has a point.
"I'll come pick you up, if you want to call me when you get in."
It's funny, how I can almost see his head shaking when he declines. "I'll get myself there, it's all right. As long as I'm going anyway, I have this strange masochistic urge to walk the mountain a bit."
"Well, if you really want to. More power to you." I'm glad, though, a bit. It means my old Welsh hills have gotten under his skin the way he's gotten under mine. "Call though, if you think better of it before you get here."
He laughs. "All right then. I've got to go—see you later on, Bran."
I spend most of the afternoon just waiting for him. My da's gone with David Evans and John Rowlands to the sheep market in Machynlleth, and there isn't much for me to do while they're gone. There isn't as much of a life for sheep farmers as there once was. They know it, and I know it, and that's part of the big problem in its way. My big problem, that is.
I won't pretend I have any great aspirations for my life. I can't think of a time, ever, when someone asked me "what do you want to be when you grow up, Bran?" and I had a ready answer for them. For so much of my life, I hated living here—as would anyone, I think, who had to watch people make warding gestures against him at eleven. But that was a long time ago, and Tywyn and I, we're used to each other now. I'm like a part of local history.
So I don't really want to go somewhere else, to have to get used to a whole new set of people and customs, or learn the history of somewhere else. I like how comfortable it is, knowing everyone and having them know me.
There's a part of me that wants to have adventures, that says I can't stay here forever, and asks the rest of me in demeaning whispers--/do you really want to stay here watching sheep for the rest of your life? Will you really be happy with that? Don't you want to do something?/
I'm not sure about that. I used to just keep putting the decision off, but I'm twenty now, and I begin to feel like I'm late for something.
Only now, I have other things to worry about, like getting a full night's sleep without dreaming.
Evening comes on slow, and almost I go out for a walk myself, thinking I might catch Will on his way up. I think better of it and start cooking instead. I'm determined to be a good host, especially since I still don't really know what it is I want from him. Just company really, I suppose. To wake up in the middle of the night and hear him tell me it's only a dream, instead of staring into the shadows alone.
Finally there's a loud thump on the door. It swings open before I reach it, and in he comes—the broad grin that lights up his face and floppy brown hair that falls in his eyes, a grey jumper tied round his waist and a beat-up knapsack swung over his shoulder. "Heyla!" he calls, and brings the warmth with him, as if he carried the shadows of his entire huge family in his pocket. "Smells good. I'm not very late, am I? I got a ride partway in, but it's a bit more of a walk than I remember it."
"Well, it's been a while since you walked it." I take his bag and give him an awkward hug—awkward because the knapsack is thumping against my leg and he was just about to turn, not because it feels anything less than natural. "Croeso i cartref."
He blinks at me. "What's that then?"
"Silly English. I thought you'd have picked up a bit of Welsh by now, at least. But I just said welcome, and come in." That's not completely true, and really I am glad he didn't understand, because I didn't mean to say the words. They just came out. 'Welcome home,' I'd said. "Have you been to see your aunt yet?"
He shakes his head, regarding me with this dry sort of tolerant amusement he didn't have when we were little—he must have grown into it, and it suits him. "She doesn't even know I'm here. Since she's not the one who got me out of bed at four this morning, I thought I'd come see you first."
All right, I deserved that. "Just asking. You know where everything is, right? Not much changed around here, I'm afraid, so make yourself at home." I pause, halfway to taking his pack into my room. "You know, I'm not entirely sure where you're going to sleep."
There's that not-quite-laugh again. "We'll figure something out. In the meantime, can I be fed soon? Not to be too demanding, but I've had an apple and part of a sandwich, all day. I'm hungry."
And just like that, he slides right into my life again, as if he'd never really left it, or as if there'd been a place for him left permanently open. It was like that the first time, too, though I don't recall as much of that as I want to. He came because he was sick, and went wandering up through the mountains, and Cafall found him there. We fell in together—I suppose it was because we were the only two boys our age around, and both a bit of outcasts at that. The foreigner and the freak.
I wish I could remember our first day together.
It took years for me to get over that dog.
We talk about everything except my dreams. I tell him all about how everyone is doing here, which isn't too exciting in the grand scheme of things, but he really seems interested. And he tells me what he's been up to. Will is studying medieval literatures, though he says he may change to history. I can't explain why I think this is funny, or why it seems to fit him so well. He goes home to his family and sings in the church choir on holidays, because he is Will, and everything about him is bizarrely comforting and ordinary. It's only in very rare moments, when I think I see something else in his calm eyes—danger and weariness and longing, and he always changes the subject before I can say anything about it.
"Oh!" he says, after we've eaten and cleared the dishes away, and sprawled out on the floor in front of the empty fireplace. "I almost forgot—I brought you something."
"You did? When'd you have time to get me anything?" Not the most gracious thing—what I meant was probably something like thank you, you didn't need to. He doesn't mind, just grins ruefully, fumbling around in his pocket til he comes out with a little rumpled bag.
"Actually I made it for you ages ago. I was going to send it down for your birthday, but I'd rather give it to you in person anyway. It isn't much."
I upend the bag into my hand. Something small and silver drops into my palm, followed by a silver chain that pools around it. I shift again, to dangle it from my fingers. A charm, not big or ostentatious, just small like the cross my da wears, only it isn't. It's a circle, quartered by a plain-armed cross, and something twists in my mind as soon as I look at it—the same sort of feeling that the dreams bring, that feeling of something that wants me to remember it, only this isn't frightening at all. Safe, rather, like Will.
"Diolch. Thank you." It wants to belong to me, I can feel it, so I fasten it around my neck. And I like that he made something for me. I'd forgotten, actually, that he was talented that way.
"You're welcome." He sounds subdued, and the silence stretches between us for a long moment while we try to find what to say next.
"You want to go for a walk? It's warm yet."
His smile returns, but he shakes his head. "No, thanks. I walked up already...tomorrow, though, if it's nice. I'd rather be lazy tonight."
So we do. It is warm, so we venture outside just a little past the door and lie out on the grass, and listen to the night birds and insects.
"I'd forgotten how the wind smells, here," Will says after a while.
"Because you don't come often enough, that's why." He doesn't answer, and I let the conversation wander where it will. "Do you ever wish we were kids again?"
"Yes, actually," he admits quietly. "I do, sometimes."
In the end we decide that Will and I will share my bed. He doesn't feel right, sleeping in my da's, and neither do I. Besides, if he's here to stop me dreaming, he ought to be close. My bed is big enough that we don't touch each other, but still I can sense him there, in the depression of the mattress and the way the blanket doesn't fall quite normally around my shoulders.
"Nos da," I whisper, as his breathing evens out into the long sighs of sleep. The rhythm is as soothing as the knowledge that he's there, that I'm not left alone in this place to wait for nightmares to claim me.
They do, in time—I do not know how long I sleep without them, or how long I run from them. Time, in dreams, is easy to confuse.
//--the raven boy--//
A sword in my hands, the blade glowing blue. I've never had a weapon before, when they come, but I'm afraid this one isn't going to do me any good, that I will drop it before I have a chance to use it. The riders are coming, with their fire-eyed horses. My back is to a tree, and all I can do is stand firm as they ride, and lay about with Eirias, though I know it will not do me any good.
Eirias? How do I know the sword's name?
Then the tree is shaking, and I am shaking with it, and out of the clouds someone is calling my name—
"Bran! Bran, wake up!" Cool hands on my face pull me out of the dream; my eyes open to Will Stanton's clear grey ones staring down at me, his straight brown hair falling, curtaining his face, brushing my cheeks.
"Will," I whisper, "how do I know the name of the sword?"
He looks away, but not before I see something lost and longing in his eyes. "I don't know, Bran. Funny things happen, in dreams."
"I'm glad you're here, anyway."
His fingers brush the hollow of my throat, where the little cross charm is resting. "Go back to sleep. I'll watch, so you don't dream." He twines his hand in mine, and maybe it ought to feel strange, but it doesn't. It's like he's supposed to be here. So I roll onto my side and nestle in again, and it's only when I can't feel his hand anymore that I realise I'm about to fall asleep again.
*****
Welsh translations:
unigrwydd: loneliness
Croeso i cartref: welcome home
diolch: thank you
nos da: good night